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The Virgin Suicides Wiki
"The Trees, like Lungs, filling with Air, my Sister, the Mean one, pulling my Hair..." -''The Virgin Suicides'' 'The Virgin Suicides...?' The Virgin Suicides is a highly praised 1993 debut novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan suburbia in the mid-1970s, centers around the bizzare and haunting suicides of five beautiful American teenage sisters. The Lisbon girls' suicides fascinate their community as their neighbors struggle to find an explanation for their shocking acts. Twenty years later the girls enigmatic personalities are still engraved in the minds of the neighborhood boys who worshipped them. In 1999 the novel was made into a successful debut film by director Sofia Coppola, starring actress Kirsten Dunst as Lux Lisbon and actor Josh Hartnett as Trip Fontaine. The Five Glittering Lisbon Daughters... "The two Lisbon parents, leached of color, like photographic negatives. Then, the five glittering Lisbon daughters, in their homemade dresses, all lace and ruffle, their skin, bursting with their fructifying flesh..." ''-The Virgin Suicides'' Michigan, Circa 1975... In a decaying suburb filled with dying fish flies and dying trees on the outskirts of Detroit, the Lisbons are a religious catholic family of seven. The father, Ronald Lisbon, is a geeky math teacher at a private school and the mother, Mrs. Lisbon is a very strict homemaker. The family has five daughters: 13-year-old Cecilia, 14-year-old Lux, 15-year-old Bonnie, 16-year-old Mary, and 17-year-old Therese. The girls are all described as having long blonde hair, blue eyes and are said to be all incredibly beautiful. We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgin Suicides'' Their lives change dramatically within one summer when Cecilia, a stoic and astute girl described as an "outsider", attempts suicide by cutting her wrists while taking a bath. After visiting a therapist, the Lisbon parents are told to let their daughters have a little more independence and freedom. However, a few weeks later, the girls throw a chaperoned party and invite the neighborhood boys over. During this event Cecilia excuses herself only to deliberately jump from her second story bedroom window and dies by being impaled by a sharp spiked iron fence post below. The cause of Cecilia's suicide and its after-effects on the Lisbon family are popular subjects of neighborhood gossip. The mystique of the Lisbon girls operates also for the neighborhood boys, the narrators of the novel. Shorty after Cecilia's wake, the boys get ahold of her Diary, which is filled with short poems and random entries. The boys find it interesting that Cecilia refers to her and her sisters as one entity, thus concluding that Cecilia was a "dreamer" who was completely out of touch with reality. Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly -''The Virgin Suicides'' Unable to truly fathom the girls, the boys day dream and fantasize about the Lisbon sisters in dreamy and gauzy settings and wonder how the girls truly feel and what they think. The Lisbon girls run wildly and freely around in the boys minds like fleeting visions, unfathomable and unattainable. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them. ''-The Virgins Suicides'' When summer ends school begins, and the four remaining Lisbon girls attend school as if nothing ever happened which makes the sisters even more captivating. Soon Lux Lisbon begins a hot and heavy romance with local heartthrob and teen womanizer Trip Fontaine. Trip negotiates with the overprotective Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon to take Lux to a Homecoming dance, on the condition that he finds dates for the other three girls. During the dance Lux and Trip win Queen and King of Homecoming. After they are crowned Trip ditches the dance to have sex with Lux on the high school football field. After taking Lux's virginity, he abandons her and as a result Lux misses her curfew and comes home hours after her sisters. Consequently as punishment, the Lisbons become recluses as Mrs. Lisbon pulls all her daughters out of school, believing that it would help the girls recover from Cecilia's death. However, despite her attempt to protect the girls from the dangers of the outside world, over the winter, Lux is seen having sex on the roof nightly with random boys and men. A few months after Lux is sent to the hospital because of a pregnancy scare—which her parents were told was simply indigestion—Mr. Lisbon officially takes a leave of absence. Their house falls into a deeper state of disrepair; none of them leave the house and no one visits, not even to deliver milk and groceries. Soon, a very strange rotting smell coming from the Lisbon house permeates the entire block on the neighborhood. From a safe distance, all the people in the neighborhood watch the Lisbons' lives deteriorate, but no one can summon up the courage to help or intervene. Months pass by, and the Lisbons only leave their home to attend church and nothing else. As the Lisbons sink futher and further into virtual isolation, they become increasingly fascinating to the neighborhood in general. The boys try to make contact with the Lisbon girls and decided to call them to communicate by playing records over the telephone for the girls, unable to find the right words to express their feelings, they say it through music. Finally, the girls send a message to the boys one night to come to the their house. Shortly after the boys arrive they meet Lux who is all alone, and calmly smoking a cigarette. She tells the boys to wait quietly inside while she leaves the house to go into the garage to start the car, leaving the boys to believe they will flee the country with the girls and elope. But instead the boys witness three of the Lisbon sisters kill themselves: Bonnie hangs herself, Therese overdoses on sleeping pills, and Lux dies of carbon monoxide poisoning. Mary attempts suicide by putting her head in the oven, but fails. Mary continues to live for another month spending her time sleeping and obsessively showering before successfully ending her life by taking sleeping pills on the same day as another girl's Debutante party. Newspaper writer Linda Perl notes that the suicides come a year after Cecilia's first attempt. After the suicide "free-for-all," Mr. and Mrs. Lisbon leave the neighborhood. The house is sold to a young couple from the Boston area and most of the Lisbons' personal effects are either thrown out or sold in a garage sale. The narrators scavenge through the trash to collect much of the "evidence" they mention, collecting whatever they could find and save these items like valuable souvenirs. They had killed themselves over our dying forests, over manatees maimed by propellers as they surfaced to drink from garden hoses; they had killed themselves at the sight of used tires stacked higher than the pyramids; they had killed themselves over the failure to find a love none of us could ever be. In the end, the tortures tearing the Lisbon girls pointed to a simple reasoned refusal to accept the world as it was handed down to them, so full of flaws. -''The Virgin Suicides'' Twenty years later the boys are still obsessed with the girls who they claim to be secretly still in love with despite having families of their own now. Concluding that they will never be able to put the peices of the five legendary suicides back together and find a satisfying answer to end the mystery surrounding the girls and their tragic actions. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together. -''The Virgin Suicides'' The Lisbon Deaths Cecilia Lisbon Cecilia attempts Suicide by slitting her wrist in the bathtub but is unsuccessful. A few weeks later she succeeds to commit Suicide by jumping out her second story bedroom window and lands on the iron fence below and is stabbed by one of the sharp spikes that goes straight through her heart. "Mr. Lisbon was trying to lift her left breast, traveled through her inexplicable heart, separated two vertebrae without shattering either, and ripping the dress and finding the air again" (Eugenides 37). "She had succeeded, on the second try, in hurling herself out of the world." (Eugenides 38). Luxie Lisbon Lux commits Suicide by shutting herself up in the garage with the family station wagon on and dies by poison carbon monoxide. "They found her in the front seat, grey faced and serene, holding a cigarette lighter that had burned its coils into her palm" (Eugenides 281). Bonnie Lisbon In the basement, the boys find Bonnie, fist a pair of legs swinging from the rafters to look up and see that she has hanged herself. "Above him, in a pink dress, Bonnie looked clean and festive, like a pinata" (Eugenides 280)." Mary Lisbon Mary commits suicide by putting her head in the oven with the gas on right when she hears Bonnie kick her suitcase over in the basement. "They found Mary in the kitchen, not dead but nearly so, her head and torso thrust into the oven as though she was scrubbing it" (Eugenides 284). Mary's first attempt at death fails but she is successful on her second try by overdosing on sleeping pills like her older sister Therese a month later. "The last Lisbon daughter, Mary, in a sleeping bag, and full of sleeping pills" (Eugenides 309). Therese Lisbon Therese's method of choice was sleeping pills and gin. The sleeping pills were probably stolen from her mother, who Lux mentions is an insomniac. "Another reporter ended his broadcast by reading a letter Therese had written to the Brown's admissions officer only three days before she put an end to any dreams of college...or of anything else" (Eugenides 291). Latest activity Category:Browse